Expansion options are unaffected, as you’re still left with six 266MHz PCI-X hot-plug slots to play with. There’s more fault tolerance, as the pair of Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports can be joined together in a failover team and the system was also supplied with both 1,300W hot-swap power supplies. These can be lifted vertically from the chassis, so no rear clearance is required when replacing a failed unit. Cooling gets plenty of attention, with PCI slot section looked after by a bank of four hot-swap fans, while four more are positioned in front of the memory modules.
The xSeries 366 really has set the bar for the next generation of multiprocessor rack-mount servers. It’s clearly capable of delivering a high processing density, which will get even greater when Intel releases its dual-core Xeons at the end of 2005. Expansion potential and fault tolerance are excellent, it’s equipped with the latest RAID-protected SAS storage and backs it all up with excellent remote management and monitoring features.
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